Adolescent Literacy More Than Remediation Gina Biancarosa

Adolescent Literacy: More Than Remediation

Summary:
Transition begins at 3rd grade where students go from learning to read to reading to learn. Too often schools continue to remediate basic reading skills when really the students need remediation along with adolescent reading skills that are vital to success in the higher grades.

Three challenges students face include:

1. mastering difficult text
a. length of text
b. complex words
c. complex sentences
d. synthesizing information across different texts and formats (charts, graphs, etc)

2. identifying the distinctions between reading in different content areas
a. schools don't explicitly teach how to read in different content areas
b. understanding what counts in each discipline

3. reading digital content
a. provides different options for proceeding through texts.
b. instead of teaching background knowledge, focus on search strategies of informational websites that can be used to build backgrounnd knowledge and tools necessary to search.
c. literacy and technology skills that need to need to be mastered to succeed in today's society are becoming more intertwined.

How to Support Adolescent Literacy
a. struggling readers need not only remediation of basic reading skills but also instruction in adolescent literacy.
b. schools need to make the technology available in order to instruct.
c. content teachers are responsible for teaching how to read materials in their discipline.......therefore we need more professional development to achieve this.
d. There is a need for the creation of good digital and discipline area formative and summative assessments.